As Churchill once said, there are no eternal friends or eternal enemies in the world, only eternal interests.

In 1969, due to the needs of the international situation, my unit was dispatched deep into the Kunlun Mountains for construction. Because the environment was so harsh, the progress of the project was unexpectedly slow. Over three years, dozens of officers and soldiers sacrificed their lives at the construction site, yet we had only completed two-thirds of the military facility we were building.

At this time, the global situation was reshuffled again. In '72, Nixon visited China, and Sino-American relations thawed. China’s strategic deployment underwent another massive adjustment. The project in the Kunlun Mountains was halted, and we—engineering soldiers forced into this role mid-career—were reassigned back to the combat sequence of the field army, subordinated to the Lanzhou Military Region.

Day after day, year after year, it was training, drills, exercises, study sessions, and critiques. Life in the barracks was not only monotonous but also arduous. A few more years passed, the **ended, and the Party Central Committee promptly corrected the mistakes, smashing the Gang of Four. After a full decade of chaos, social order was finally restored.

However, the military is a special environment detached from society, and I didn't feel much change in the barracks myself. The only difference was that we no longer needed to recite Chairman Mao’s quotations upon meeting someone, though we still had to conduct revolutionary education for new recruits when they arrived.

One morning, just as I returned from a meeting at the battalion headquarters, the orderly, Little Liu, rushed up breathlessly: “Report, Company Commander, a platoon of new recruits is reporting today. But the Political Instructor is at the Military Region for training, so the request is for you to lecture the new men on revolution and tradition.”

Lecturing on revolution and tradition essentially meant recounting the history of our company. I was a complete layman in this regard, but since I was now the commander of the First Company and the Political Instructor was absent, I had no choice but to brace myself and go ahead.

I led the more than thirty new recruits into the company’s Hall of Honor. Pointing to a silken banner embroidered with the words "Bayonet Hero Company," I told them this was an honor earned by the predecessors of our Sixth Company during the Huaihai Campaign, a title preserved to this day. I embellished the narrative of that fierce battle, describing how the Sixth Company engaged in bloody close-quarters combat, and how, even when running out of ammunition, they used bayonets to repel the frantic assault of an entire regiment of KMT reactionaries, gloriously completing the blocking mission assigned by superiors.

Then, I pointed to a blackened, battered iron pot in a glass display case and explained to the recruits: “Comrades, do not look down on this broken pot! Back on the battlefield of the Huaihai Campaign, the revolutionary forerunners of our Sixth Company went out to kill the enemy and earn merit only after eating the pork and vermicelli stew cooked in this very pot. Look, the cracks on this pot were caused by the reactionary artillery fire of the KMT reactionaries. Even now, it silently recounts the deeds of the heroes and the brutality of the reactionaries from that time.”

That was all I could impart. After all, I wasn't the one professionally responsible for ideological work, but I felt I had done a decent job—more than enough to impress these raw recruits.

I dismissed the recruits to go eat at the mess hall and walked behind them with Little Liu. I asked him, “Company Commander’s lecture on revolution and tradition just now, how was my standard?”

Little Liu replied, “Oh, Company Commander, it was terrific! I was drooling listening to it. When will our company study the revolutionary martyrs and improve our rations so we can eat pork and vermicelli stew again?”

I swallowed hard and flicked Little Liu on the forehead: “You didn’t hear a word about revolutionary tradition, you only heard about pork and vermicelli stew! Hurry up and get to the mess hall for food. I think they’re serving steamed buns today; if you’re late, those new recruits will snatch them all up. I order you, march!”

Little Liu acknowledged with a shout and sprinted toward the mess hall. I suddenly remembered the most important instruction I had forgotten to give him and quickly yelled after him: “Make sure you pick some with big fillings!”

I lay on my **, eating a steamed bun while reading a letter just mailed from home. Everything there was fine; nothing important was mentioned. I read it twice and set it aside, then picked up the tattered, ancestral book. The experiences of the past few years had sparked a great interest in the academic field of Feng Shui. I pulled it out to pore over whenever I had time.

Because this book mentioned many terms related to the Five Elements, Eight Trigrams, and Divination—such as Eastern Jia Yi Wood, Southern Bing Ding Fire, Central Wu Ji Earth, Western Geng Xin Metal, Northern Ren Gui Water, and Qian, Kan, Gen, Zhen, Kun, Dui, Li, Xun, and so on—there were many parts I couldn't understand. Over the years, I had found and read many related books. Although my formal education was limited, I could manage to comprehend about thirty to forty percent.

The Sixteen-Character Secret Art of Yin-Yang Feng Shui refers to these sixteen characters: Heaven (Tian), Earth (Di), Man (Ren), Ghost (Gui), Spirit (Shen), Buddha (Fo), Demon (Mo), Beast (Chu), Awe (She), Suppress (Zhen), Escape (Dun), Object (Wu), Transform (Hua), Yin (Yin), Yang (Yang), Void (Kong).

I don't know the era or the author of this book, but the content is profoundly esoteric. The sixty-four variations of Fuxi’s Bagua should actually have been sixteen hexagrams. By the time of the Yin-Shang Dynasty, because these sixteen hexagrams revealed too much heavenly secrets, half of them were erased by the deities. Even the remaining eight trigrams are incomplete in their numerical representation. However, anyone who understands even a fraction of it is already formidable. Think of Zhuge Kongming; knowing just a little enabled him to help Liu Bei strategize and establish the tripartite division of the realm. Liu Bowen understood only one-third, yet he assisted Zhu Hongwu in founding the Ming Dynasty that lasted four hundred years. But I don't quite believe this—can it really be that mystical?

The only regret is that this book is only half complete, detailing the structural layout of Feng Shui, the Five Elements, and burials. The other half, concerning the numbers of Yin-Yang, the Eight Trigrams, and the Taiji, has been missing since it reached my grandfather’s hands. Reading the incomplete text, some parts are disconnected, and the language is obscure and difficult, making it hard to grasp the profound meaning. I imagine if it were the complete version, understanding it would be much easier.

Suddenly, the sound of three long and three short assembly whistles pierced the quiet air of the barracks. My first thought was: "Something must have happened; they wouldn't call a full-battalion emergency assembly in broad daylight for no reason." I stuffed the remaining two steamed buns into my mouth and sprang off my **, dashing out the door.

Columns were lined up neatly. I saw that it wasn't just our battalion assembling; the entire regiment had been called out. A subordinate officer like myself had no right to know the nature of the mission; we were only qualified to obey orders. The command we received was to proceed to the railway station and await deployment with the brother units.

When ten thousand men gather, it resembles a sea of people. The military railway station was packed with thousands of soldiers, appearing from a distance like a tide of green. It looked like the entire division had been mobilized. Mobilizing an entire division back then was a huge event; our main-force division had a massive structure, comprising three infantry regiments, supplemented by an artillery regiment, a tank regiment, plus the division headquarters and logistics units—totaling nearly twenty thousand people. What could such a large-scale operation be for? It shouldn't be disaster relief; I hadn't heard of any recent disasters nearby.

We were nonsensically transported by those iron can cars all the way to the Yunnan border. Only then did everyone realize: we were going to war. Many men started weeping at that moment…

Simultaneously, Deng Xiaoping, visiting the US, made a startling remark at the White House: “If a child misbehaves, they need a spanking.” And he publicly confirmed the large-scale mobilization of Chinese troops along the Sino-Vietnamese border.

In the early morning of February 17th, twenty-two thousand PLA soldiers from seventeen divisions launched an all-out attack, fighting all the way to Lang Son. On March 4th, China announced its withdrawal.

My company was the spearhead of the main-force division, taking the brunt of the fighting. After ten days of combat, we had suffered over fifty percent casualties. During another march, we were ambushed by Vietnamese special agents. They used women holding children as cover, throwing explosive charges into our armored personnel carriers. Eight of my soldiers were blown up and killed inside the carrier. My eyes immediately turned red with rage. I killed three of the attackers and captured two remaining Vietnamese militiamen, an old man and a young woman.

They were a Vietnamese old man in his fifties and a woman in her twenties; they appeared to be father and daughter. One of my subordinates told me that this woman had disguised the explosive charge as an infant cradled in her arms and thrown it into the APC as they passed. There was no mistake; she was the one responsible.

My greatest fear was watching my comrades die before my eyes. In a fit of fury, I completely forgot the Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention, and our army’s policy toward prisoners of war. I had someone tie an explosive charge to the bottom of the Vietnamese woman, forcing her to "take an earth flight." I bound the old man tightly and threw him from a cliff into the minefield.

This incident was a severe breach of military discipline and even alarmed Chief Xu at the headquarters. If not for my deep connections back home within the Military Region, I would have been sent to a military tribunal long ago. My military career was forcibly terminated then and there, and I returned to my hometown with a certificate of demobilization.